Zend Framework – ZF: Concepts, Methods and Examples

Zend Framework is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 5 and licensed under the New BSD License. Zend Framework—often referred to as ZF—is developed with the goal of simplifying web development while promoting best practices in the PHP developer community.
ZF’s use-at-will architecture allows developers to reuse components when and where they make sense in their applications without requiring other ZF components beyond minimal dependencies. There is therefore no single development paradigm or pattern that all Zend Framework users must follow, although ZF does provide components for the MVC and Table Gateway design patterns which are used in most ZF applications. Zend Framework provides individual components for many other common requirements in web application development, including authentication and authorization via access control lists (ACL), application configuration, data caching, filtering/validation of user-provided data for security and data integrity, internationalization, interfaces to AJAX functionality, email composition/delivery, Lucene-format search indexing and querying, and all Google Data APIs along with many other popular web services. Because of their loosely coupled design, ZF components can be used relatively easy alongside components from other PHP web application frameworks.

XQuery: query collections of XML data

XQuery is a query language (with some programming language features) that is designed to query collections of XML data. It is semantically similar to SQL.

XQuery 1.0 was developed by the XML Query working group of the W3C. The work was closely coordinated with the development of XSLT 2.0 by the XSL Working Group; the two groups shared responsibility for XPath 2.0, which is a subset of XQuery 1.0. XQuery 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on January 23, 2007.

“The mission of the XML Query project is to provide flexible query facilities to extract data from real and virtual documents on the World Wide Web, therefore finally providing the needed interaction between the Web world and the database world. Ultimately, collections of XML files will be accessed like databases”.

Dan Kaminsky: bug in DNS

A computer researcher revealed a fundamental flaw in the Internet’s addressing system, necessitating a massive Internet security upgrade primarily for businesses and service providers, according to a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

The problem makes it possible for computer hackers to reroute Internet traffic at will, enabling them access to sensitive and valuable information from businesses …

So there’s a bug in DNS, the name-to-address mapping system at the core of most Internet services. DNS goes bad, every website goes bad, and every email goes…somewhere. Not where it was supposed to.

DTD manipulation

Document Type Definition (DTD) is one of several SGML and XML schema languages, and is also the term used to describe a document or portion thereof that is authored in the DTD language. A DTD is primarily used for the expression of a schema via a set of declarations that conform to a particular markup syntax and that describe a class, or type, of document, in terms of constraints on the structure of that document. A DTD may also declare constructs that are not always required to establish document structure, but that may affect the interpretation of some documents. XML documents are described using a subset of DTD which imposes a number of restrictions on the document’s structure, as required per the XML standard (XML is in itself an application of SGML optimized for automated parsing).

HTML 5: What’s news?

January 22nd W3C published the latest working draft for HTML 5. The HTML 5 working group includes AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera and many hundred other vendors.

Some of the new features in HTML 5 are functions for embedding audio, video and graphics, client-side data storage, and interactive documents. Other features are new page elements like <header>, <section>, <footer>, and <figure>.

HTML 5 improves interoperability and reduce development costs by making precise rules on how to handle all HTML elements, and how to recover from errors.

Viewzi – New Ways to Search the Internet (Max Kiesler)

Visual searches just keep getting better and better. Viewzi is a meta search engine that lets you view relational data in a fun and easy to use visual paradigm. Currently, there are fourteen ways to view a search term including, mp3, video, 3d photo, basic photo, web screenshots and the list goes on. You can scale the results with an interactive slider and they also provide related results in the sidebar. Overall, I find Viewzi a compelling and engaging way to search.

Smarty

This article is intended for PHP programmers and HTML designers interested in applying a new technique for web development – PHP templating. Advanced knowledge of PHP programming and HTML is assumed.

Smarty Overview

The theoretical web development process is that: first the designer makes the interface, and breaks it down into HTML pieces for the programmer then the programmer implements the PHP business logic into the HTML.

That’s fine in theory, but in practice, from my experience, the client frequently comes with more requirements, or maybe more modifications to the design or to the business logic. When this happens , the HTML is modified (or words rebuilt ) programmer changes the code inside HTML.

The problem with this scenario is that the programmer needs to be on stand-by until the designer completes the layout and the HTML files. Another problem is that if there is a major design change then the programmer will change the code to fit in the new page. And that’s why I recommand Smarty. Smarty is a templating engine for PHP.